Day 92 of 100 Indian Tinder Tales
A from Navi Mumbai shares her tale.

“So, this was about a year back. I’d been in Pune for a year and a half and I’d been out of a relationship and completely off the dating scene for about three years. This is about one of the Tinder dates I went on after that sabbatical.

He and I had been texting for a week or so when he suggested we meet. I suggested a cafe near my place and he agreed. I intended on having exactly one pint of beer so I wouldn’t be paralysed by awkwardness as I usually am with new people. We met on a rather humid afternoon on a dry day(haha!).

The meeting was planned on very short notice and I’d had a total of fifteen minutes to dress up and head out. When I got out of the rick, he was waiting there, ridiculously tall and startlingly in focus after all his blurred Tinder pictures.

When we sat down at the cafe and were told it was a dry day, we both laughed at the situation, even though I could feel all my sweat pores opening in sheer panic. We settled on coffee and he started to talk. And talk. And talk. He told me how he loved reading (huge plus), how he loved sports (can’t be a minus) and how he’d once hit his girlfriend when they were fighting, and oh how it was she who had started getting violent. All this was in one volley of conversation, with me merely breathing to interrupt. I winced and swore loudly at this last revelation. He tried his best to justify it and then gave up and moved onto talking about something else.

I sat back and sipped my coffee for the rest of conversation, zoning out every now and then to shudder in my head. I should have just walked out, but instead I passively sat there, got dropped back home, heaved a sigh of relief and a mutter of disgust to myself and deleted his number.

He texted me a few hours after dropping me off and said he’d had a really great time (wouldn’t anyone have a great time sitting through their own goddamn monologue). He said it had been nice meeting me and we should meet again and I should go with him to his friend’s place for one of their all night parties. I said nothing to all of this, pretending to not have read the messages. Then he told me that I looked different in person, and “my face was fuller than in my pictures”, but how it was totally okay because once we’d met he realised it didn’t matter because I was so nice to talk to.

We had had an argument about weight and body shaming before I’d even met him and so he probably felt the need to tell me how nice I was to talk to despite being “fuller” (pointing out the direct correlation between body weight and sociability apparently). I said a few things which basically implied “fuck off, I don’t like you anyway”, though I was as always polite about it. He said we should give it a shot and slipped in somewhere that I should run or play or do some sort of exercise. I ended my politeness and the conversation by telling him he wasn’t doing me a favour by enjoying my company and that I didn’t even in my most awful nightmares want to be with someone who thought like him.

That finished the conversation, but having always felt horribly insecure about my body, I still had an insulted, hurt little pit in my stomach. I don’t think I’ll ever forget that date, more than anything for the flippantly told story of him hitting his girlfriend. I guess I should be glad that he revealed so much and I got to see right through him right then.”

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